These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.

Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.

This is a collection of web page captures from links added to, or changed on, Wikipedia pages. The idea is to bring a reliability to Wikipedia outlinks so that if the pages referenced by Wikipedia articles are changed, or go away, a reader can permanently find what was originally referred to.

There is something distasteful about shaking hands with a killer. What makes that sense of unease even worse is when you know that the person you are meeting was responsible for one of the worst atrocities of the Second World War.

It was just such a situation I found myself in one weekday in June 2007, in a suburb of Rome.

Standing at the door to his flat on the top floor of an apartment block was a kindly looking 93-year-old man, who I was to interview for a book I was writing on the hunt for Nazi war criminals.

The old man’s name was Erich Priebke, and yesterday he died at his home in Italy at the age of 100.

They say that only the good die young, and in this instance, the bad certainly died old.

A row has raged for days over the officer's last burial place after because authorities fear the grave could become a site of pilgrimage for his neo-Nazi fanbase

For the man in front of me was a former Gestapo captain who had helped to organise and had participated in the notorious Ardeatine Caves massacre in 1944, in which 335 innocents were slaughtered on the orders of Adolf Hitler as a reprisal for a partisan ambush in Rome in which 33 SS troops had died.

Our interview was conducted in English, which he had learnt while working as a waiter at the Savoy in London in the 1930s.

As he ushered me into his flat, I thought of a document I had seen only recently in the National Archives back in London, in which Priebke had calmly told a British war crimes investigator how he had ‘killed a man with an Italian machine pistol’, and how towards the end of the massacre, he had ‘killed another man with the same machine pistol’.

Share this article

Share

As well as taking part in the shootings, Priebke drew up the list of those who were going to be shot. He spent the whole night combing through the records of those whom the Germans were holding on suspicion of being in the Resistance.

To get the numbers to the ten to one ratio that Hitler had demanded, Priebke even included political prisoners who had been arrested on the flimsiest of evidence. Some of those on the list were teenagers, with the youngest being just 15.

Remorseless: Priebke picutred during a court appearance in 1996, he had previously been jailed for life by a military court for the massacre of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves near Rome

On the morning of March 24, 1944, the
prisoners were taken by the Gestapo and the SS to the Ardeatine Caves,
south of the centre of Rome. With their hands tied behind their backs,
they were led into the caves in groups of five, and then shot in the
back of the head.

A report written by an Italian professor of legal medicine in September 1945 conveys the full horror of what took place. ‘The victims fell face downwards, and gradually, as the other condemned arrived, they were obviously made to climb up on the other bodies of the previous victims, otherwise the position of the bodies in layers and their almost uniform prone position could not be explained.’

In order to give his men the wherewithal to commit mass murder, the senior Gestapo officer provided them with a caseload of cognac. As the day wore on and the alcohol was imbibed, their shots became less accurate, thus even depriving their victims of a clean kill.

This, then, was the savagery which Erich Priebke had helped to oversee. To my astonishment, on the day we met, even though it was only 10.30am, he wondered whether I might like to share a bottle of red wine.

I hesitated. Could I accept such hospitality from such a man? In the end, I agreed, rationalising that superficial conviviality would make for a more revealing interview.

As it happened, it did, and what took place that morning was, to the best of my knowledge, the last interview that Erich Priebke gave.

Death: Erich Priebke, who carried out one of Italy's worst massacres, died today aged 100

He told me about his childhood, and
how the early deaths of his parents meant that he had to work at 14. He
started working at a hotel in Berlin, later moving to the Savoy.

He
walked to the hotel from his digs in Kensington, and was in the city
for the Silver Jubilee of George V in 1935. ‘People from all over the
world came,’ he said with fond recollection. ‘The Bengal Lancers and
people like that!’

But the war changed Priebke’s
trajectory, and his linguistic ability caught the eye of the Gestapo.

Intelligent and able, he joined its leadership school, and by February
1941, he had been made a police attaché in the German Embassy in Rome.

During
our talk, it became clear that Priebke had no wish to discuss the
massacre. And there seemed little point asking him, as he had no doubt
rehearsed tired old lines about ‘following orders’.

But
he did tell me how he had escaped from the British in 1946, and how he
and his wife and two children had been helped by members of the Roman
Catholic Church to start a new life in Argentina.

Outrage: In the lead up to his birthday Jewish groups called for celebrations to be banned

Priebke
arrived in South America without a bean, but he built himself up to
become a pillar of the very Germanic town of Bariloche in Patagonia.
Astonishingly, he lived openly under his own name, and he and his family
were even registered with the German Embassy.

For half a century, Priebke lived
unmolested, until in 1994 he was accosted by Sam Donaldson, of ABC News.
When the report was televised, the Italian public were incensed that
Priebke could walk around freely, and in 1996 he was extradited to
Italy, where he faced a series of trials that made headlines around the
world.

In March 1998, he was
sentenced to life imprisonment. At the age of 84, he was too old for
prison, so he was detained in his apartment, where he would spend the
rest of his days, and where I would interview him.

Appeal: Priebke is escorted by police as he is transferred to the Forte Boccea military prison in Rome in the 1990s

But despite his harmless appearance and the hospitality, there was
plenty of the unrepentant Nazi in Priebke. He told me that the then
Pope, Benedict, did not wish to help have him released because he was
‘afraid of the Jews’.

Priebke
also appeared to deny the Holocaust when he said to me – ‘We did not
act against them for practical reasons. We needed the railway cars for
other things.’

After more
than two hours, our conversation came to close. I left his flat,
retrieved my passport from the policeman who guarded the block, and
walked out into the sunshine. On a nearby wall I noticed some graffiti
which read, ‘Death to Nazi Priebke’.

Yesterday,
that wish was finally granted – seven decades after so many men were
brutally executed while this dead-eyed monster picked his victims out
and pulled the trigger again and again.